A Worldwide Race Has a Winner, but Is Not Over

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/02/sports/francois-gabart-wins-vendee-globe.html

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During the frigid early hours Sunday, François Gabart was on the verge of becoming the youngest winner of the Vendée Globe, the solo, nonstop, around-the-world sailing race.

In his first attempt at the race, he would become the first person to lap the globe in a monohull in under 80 days.

But Gabart, a normally bubbly and joking Frenchman, showed no signs of elation.

Gabart, 29, raised a hand as he saw his father, his mentor and his sponsor pull up alongside him about four hours from the finish in Les Sables-d’Olonne, France. But he did not speak to them.

“It was quite disappointing to us,” said Gabart’s mentor, Michel Desjoyeaux, the only sailor to win the race twice. “We didn’t know a François like that. He was sailing, he was racing, he was finishing the job.”

What Desjoyeaux saw that morning was a changed person, a champion who knows how quickly the sea can stop you in your tracks and how not to just finish, but win.

“I was trained not to lose focus,” said Gabart, who left his girlfriend and infant son at home for the race. “The best way to get back to them quickly is to focus on making the boat go fast. The Vendée Globe is very difficult. If I worried, if there were two seconds I was not focused, you can break something, then the race stops.”

While Gabart and two others finished this week, nine are left on the course and eight have retired since the start in November. His compatriot Jean-Pierre Dick lost his keel two weeks ago and anchored this week in the Galician port of San Ciprián to assess the damage. Other competitors, spread out as far south as the Equator, are nursing damaged boats.

“Just seconds before the finish, he put his head in his hands and started to think about what he had accomplished,” Desjoyeaux said in a phone interview from France.

Gabart was welcomed by tens of thousands of spectators as he was escorted down the mile-long channel in Les Sables-d’Olonne after finishing the race in 78 days.

Just three hours behind him was Armel Le Cléac’h, making this the closest finish in race history. Both sailors shared the same yacht design firm for their boats, and were within sight of each other for parts of the race until a tactical split around Cape Horn in which Gabart begin to extend his lead.

Gabart had to retire from the Barcelona World Race in 2011, a double-handed, nonstop, around-the-world race he began with Desjoyeaux. He said that experience made his victory even sweeter.

It also made him appreciate the struggles of Alex Thomson, the third-place finisher who had retired from the race in his two previous attempts. “For Alex, it has been 12 years to manage to finish this race,” Gabart said. “Of course I will follow the race until the last one. All the joy and happiness to cross the finish line is because of this. All that can happen.”

Thomson, considered one of the fastest and most daring sailors in the Imoca 60 class, the boats used for the Vendée Globe, has broken records (and boats) before and dropped out of several races. In 2006, he was rescued from his capsized boat by his fellow Briton Mike Golding, who is also competing in this year’s race.

“Sail the boat fast is what I do,” Thomson said by phone shortly after finishing the race in 80 days on Wednesday. “The first race I was trying to win. This time I was trying to finish.”

He added that the boats covered more miles in one race than most sailboats cover in the boat’s lifetime.

“It’s extremely technical,” Thomson said. “The attention to detail must be second to none.”

Desjoyeaux said the daily maintenance routine was more important than any other factor in finishing.

“You have to manage 60 jobs,” he said. “Each day you will use 20 of these, for 24 hours, 78 days, without holiday, or weekends, or dinners with friends.”

Desjoyeaux added that with Le Cléac’h so close to Gabart throughout the race, the two pushed the boats harder than ever before, breaking Desjoyeaux’s previous record by more than six days.

Every skipper had problems, and it was not the size of the problem that affected performance as much as the timing of the problem, Desjoyeaux said.

“It’s part of the game to be lucky sometimes,” he said.

Gabart said he did not know if he would do the race again.

“I’ve dreamed of this race for many years,” said Gabart, who has been resting with family members. “I think I used all that energy in three months. If I don’t have this fire inside me to do the Vendée Globe, I will not go. Right now I don’t have it. I don’t know when, I don’t know how I will get it back. It may be six months or 10 years.”